TNW reports that Gmail’s IMAP service suffered an outage of several hours last night, preventing access to email through apps.

The Web is awash with frustrated Google Apps and Gmail users who are not able to use their email because the Gmail IMAP server is down.

IMAP is an important service that helps users connect their Gmail account with third-party email clients such as Microsoft Outlook. Without a working server, Gmail does not function through these clients when using IMAP.

The webmail service doesn’t use IMAP and was thus unaffected. At the time of writing, the IMAP service is working again.